Abstract

This chapter introduces a manzai robot system, that is, an entertainment robot that is used as passive media based on manzai scenarios that are autocreated from web news articles. Manzai is a Japanese traditional standup comedy act that is usually performed by two comedians: a stooge and a straight man. Manzai robots automatically generate their manzai scripts from web news articles based on related keywords given by the audience and search results from the World Wide Web (WWW), and then perform the manzai scenarios. A manzai scenario comprises three parts: tsukami (the beginning of the manzai greeting), honneta (main body of the manzai script), and ochi (conclusion of the manzai performance). The style of manzai scenario is “shabekuri manzai,” which means talk constructed from only the manzai scenarios. The manzai scenario for the robots is served as a manzai script written in extended markup language (XML). The manzai robots are constructed to aim to facilitate the observation of the entertaining dialogue using manzai robots as a socially passive medium. The manzai robot system is focused on the content generator using the automatic script creation function. The chapter introduces the automatic creation of the manzai scripts from web news articles, management of the manzai robot systems. Then, the component-based manzai robot system is explained to make a scalability of the manzai robot system. The chapter verifies potential of the manzai robot system by implementing an automatic manzai scenario creation system and the management systems using real robots.